He got dressed and left, more to save wounded pride than anything else, afraid if he stayed he'd be begging. He walked in the cold January night, the taste of her mouth still lingering on his lips, the sting of her slap still outlined on his cheek. He wasn't sure where he was going, not sure he really wanted to go anywhere but back to her. A part of him was sure she would change her mind, was certain her love for him, and his for her, would drive her to say the words he was so desperate to hear.
But when he got back, she was gone. The bedroom still smelled of sex, of her, of them, and it was all he could do to stay in it long enough to look in the closet. Some of her clothes were gone and he knew she wasn't coming back.
He left then, this time with purpose. He drove unerringly to his mother. Told her brokenly he no longer had Carrie and sobbed in her arms like he had when he was eight, when his black lab Sam that he had known all his life and that he loved with fierce intensity, was hit by a car and died. Cried like he had then, with shoulders heaving and breath hitching and tears streaming, with hands clutching her back. As she had then, his mother cooed to him and petted him, rubbed his back until the jagged edges of the sobs smoothed out and finally subsided.
He spent the night at his folks'. He was played out, physically and emotionally, and he slept hard. He didn't hear his parents begin their day or leave the house, didn't hear anything until he finally woke at noon. He didn't get up, his body aching, heavy and uncooperative, the beginnings of a headache stabbing at his temples. So he stayed in the bed, didn't know what else to do anyway, wasn't scheduled on the roster at the station, and didn't frankly see any reason to struggle with putting effort into moving. He was pretty sure he would have lain there all day, cocooned in the bed of his childhood, but his brother had shown up and told him he was taking him home with him.
It had been shrewd instincts on his mother's part, he thought later, to call in Will. Will was fourteen years older and on track to becoming a career cop, a detective in vice gunning for head of the division. William Stokes, Jr., was aptly named, Nick had always thought. He was very much his father's son—tough but fair, respectful and commanding of respect. He had a strong sense of family loyalty and duty, and right then, Nick knew, his assigned duty was to keep his little brother from self-destructing.
He spent two weeks with Will. Two weeks in which he wallowed in miring self-pity and Will practiced tough love. In the mornings Will would enter the guestroom and demand that Nick haul his sorry ass out of bed before he did it for him, and Nick would mumble savagely at him to go fuck himself. But he always got up, managed to shower and shave and dress, get ready for work. Let Janet, his sister-in-law, force food on him, let his two nieces attempt to cheer him up. The oldest, Becky, was fifteen, and he suspected she was finding his broken heart tragically romantic and fascinating.
What it was, he had thought, was pathetic. He knew he was moping around like the rejected lover in one of Becky's romance novels, barely attempting the required motions of getting through a day. But the grief was so strong that it weighed him down, made him listless and sapped of energy. He couldn't figure out how to crawl out from under it, wasn't even sure he wanted to. He went through that first week with such an oppressive heaviness in his body and soul that he thought he would sink from the leaden burden of it, that it would drive him to his knees.
It almost did. Would have, he was sure, if Will and Janet hadn't kept him afloat. He gave Janet his key to the duplex and she picked up clothes and toiletries for him, brought him his mail every few days. He knew it was an imposition on her, but he just couldn't bring himself to go back there. He tried, mid-week, but ended up just sitting in the drive in his patrol car, the sadness shattering over him, piercing through him like shards of glass.
Carrie had called his parents and knew where he was. She called him at Will's, three or four times a day for six days, begging to talk to him, pleading to be told that he was okay. But he never answered when it rang, and when one of the girls or Janet answered it, they could do nothing but tell her that he wouldn't talk to her yet.
Will was less patient. It wasn't his designated role in the family to answer the phone, but by the end of the week he had had enough. He told his wife and daughters that the next time Carrie was on the phone, he wanted it handed over to him. Becky answered and she dutifully gave the phone to her dad. Will told Carrie to hang on a minute and held out the phone to Nick. He just looked at it and shook his head stubbornly.
"Take the fucking phone, Nick, and talk to the girl, before I bash it over your goddamn head."
So he talked to her, one last time. She was staying at a friend's apartment, thought she'd stay there and help with the rent until after graduation, until she knew which graduate program she could get into. She was applying to several, none of them in Texas. They talked about the lease on the duplex, how to split up their stuff, how to pay the bills. Cautious, safe conversation, and they almost made it through. Until he fucked it up.
Because he knew he couldn't live his life without her, because he didn't even know how to try, because already there was a chasm so wide and deep he was going to spiral down into it, he begged her. Told her he didn't need to marry her, it didn't matter as much to him as he led her to believe it did. Told her they could go back to the way things were until she graduated, even if she left after that. He'd take that. Three more months, three more hours. He'd take anything. Told her he'd follow her wherever she went, it didn't matter. He could get on a police force anywhere. And if he couldn't, it wasn't important. He'd flip burgers. Promised he wouldn't hold her back, get in her way.
Told her he'd try not to love her so much.
But he heard no response, just her crying, sobbing, on the other end of the line. Finally she told him what she always did before she ended a call. "I love you, baby." And hung up.
He stayed one more week with Will and Janet, and then when Will was satisfied he could get himself up and going each day, and Janet determined that he wouldn't starve himself to death, he was deemed ready to fly solo. Will helped him find an apartment. Janet and his mother spared him having to go back to the duplex by offering to box up his things and clean up. Some guys from the force moved him into the new place. He knew it all happened, but he didn't remember details of that week, just blurs of activity swirling around him, him watching impassively from the sidelines, not interested in the details of his new life without Carrie.
What he did remember was determining that if he was ever going to get over the ache of missing her, he needed to remove himself from all the things that reminded him of her. When he unpacked, he found all the love letters she had written, all the photos of them together, and put them in a box. He took off the college ring she had given him as a graduation present and dropped that in, too. He set the box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet and knew it would be a very long time before he ever got it down again.
He started to change up his life, convincing himself that he was moving forward. He had been restless on the force for a while now. Carrie had been right about that, and it was a lot more noticeable to him now that he didn't have anything else to focus on. He liked the camaraderie, but he wasn't really satisfied being a beat cop. He was inquisitive and detail-oriented, and his job didn't really give him a chance to use those traits. He knew he'd make a good detective, be good at investigating and interrogating like Will did. But that was a decade down the road for him. He was a still a rookie cop and hadn't paid his dues like Will had, and he knew he didn't want to wait that long for the payoff.
He transferred over to the crime lab and began his training as a CSI Level One. It suited him from the start, and it was the only thing since Carrie left that he managed to take an interest in and even get excited about. The first time he crossed the yellow tape, he felt that sense of import, that sense of contribution. He felt valued. He even felt a little cocky when he saw the onlookers watching him. He was The Man.
But it hurt to be in Dallas, hurt to go to the places that he and Carrie had gone together. He still bumped into people who didn't know they had broken up and still thought of him as NickandCarrie. He had to look away from their surprised expressions when he told them it "just didn't work out." His mother and sisters gently nudged him to date again, and he grew weary of fighting them on it, not open enough to explain to them that he wasn't about to put his fragile and battered heart out there to be stomped on.
As much as he felt the attention of his family was a little smothering, at the same time he wondered if he was relying on that attention too much to put him back together again. Maybe he'd make more of an effort without a safety net. His dad had interpreted his career change as an indication that he was still "finding himself" and had offered him a job in the DA's office. He admired and respected his father, but maybe it was time to get out from under his shadow, from under Will's. Tall shadows, both of them, and hard sometimes to find the light when they were cast over him.
He began to apply to other crime labs. He wasn't too particular, anything to get the hell out of Dodge, but there was one he had his eye on. He was sent to a seminar in Chicago shortly after he began his CSI training and that's where he first met Grissom. Grissom was conducting a workshop on the role entomology plays in forensic science. Nick was so green that a lot of it was over his head, but he was impressed to the point of being in awe at Grissom's knowledge and intelligence. So he applied to the Las Vegas lab, not just for a chance to work with Grissom but because the Las Vegas crime lab was the largest in the country, not counting the federal lab, and that was just…cool.
When he got to Vegas he made a concerted effort to not take the heaviness of spirit that had haunted him in Dallas with him. His dad still held out a faint hope that he would come back home and work for him, but his mother had always said, "Bloom where you're planted." He intended to do just that. His focus was on being the best CSI he could be, learning the job and doing it well. But he tried to find balance. He joined a health club, found racquetball buddies. Joined a rec baseball league. Even took up paragliding. Made some attempts to attend to his "love life." Dated, had sex, sometimes not choosing too wisely. Joked with Warrick about chicks, light and easy. Let Warrick razz him and tell him way too often, "You gotta get a girl, bro."
The years assumed a familiar rhythm and one rolled into another. Most were good; some were hell. Some were beyond hell. But ghosting through them all were whispers of Carrie. He had been wrong, he realized after his first year in Vegas, about removing himself from all the things that reminded him of her. It hadn't made him miss her any less and he realized, with a jolt of surprise, that there were a lot of things he wanted to remember. Because the truth was, except for his spectacular free-fall at the end, those years with Carrie were the happiest he had ever been.
He commemorated the first anniversary of his arrival in Vegas by getting out his "Carrie box," as he had come to think of it, and taking out the college ring Carrie had given him. He wasn't ready for the pictures or letters, and maybe never would be, but when he put the ring back on his finger he accepted it as a token that he was finally healing, that the punch in his gut when he thought of her was no longer going to double him over. In fact, as the years passed, most of the time the memories, like the ring, were comforting and familiar. He didn't seek them out, usually, but he had gradually come to acknowledge that the memories of her, and yes, even missing and wanting her, had simply become part of who he was. Part of what made him a person.
Some mornings, though, when he slipped on the ring it felt inexplicably heavy, both on his finger and on his heart, and he'd take it back off. He wasn't into self-inflicted pain, and he had acquired a pretty fair self-awareness of when he was feeling, for whatever reason, especially vulnerable. He learned to be cautious. He knew, for instance, that he couldn't talk about her out loud, and hadn't done so until the conversation with Warrick. It had surprised him how vividly the memories came into focus when he shared them, surprised him how much he wanted to reach out and grasp that shirt and buckle.
In a way, he thought ironically, Carrie's leaving had been…instructive. He had learned to deal with the loss of Carrie by not talking about it and by avoiding the things he knew would cause him pain. Later he applied those same tactics after other things he never saw coming sucker punched him and threatened to take him down for the count. Staying away from the triggers, he called it. Usually it worked.
Except when the triggers come to me, he thought now. And sharing workspace with Carrie for the past two days was a hell of a big trigger. He had never, until just now, gone back to the tangled tapestry that was their last night together, threads of exultation and despair interwoven. And now that he had…now that he had…what?
He took stock. Yeah, he was drained and yeah, damnit, there were tears on his cheeks and he was snot-nosed. But he was still here. And now maybe that he had let the most painful memories run their course, let them have him after ten years of so carefully having his guard up, now maybe he didn't have to put so much energy into fending them off. Maybe, when he worked with Carrie again, maybe he didn't have to try so hard to keep from looking into her eyes, to keep from brushing against her when they passed. Maybe he could even enjoy having her here, enjoy the pleasures of working with an intelligent, attractive woman. Pretty good at that, he thought, always knew how to do that.
He got up and went into his bedroom, pulling open the top drawer of his dresser. He had put his ring in the drawer when he had gotten home from shift after Brass had told them that Carrie would be coming. He hadn't trusted himself to wear it, but he could now, now that the flood of memories had come and gone. He slipped it on his finger and then pulled off his shoes, too tired to untie them, and flopped onto the bed. In minutes he was asleep, a deep dreamless sleep from which he didn't emerge for another thirteen hours.
